


There is a light that never goes out

by Satellite_Of_Love



Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: AU-Soulmates, Angst, Anhedonia, Crying, Exes, Fake/Pretend Relationship, M/M, burning desire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-11
Updated: 2020-04-11
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:54:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23594920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Satellite_Of_Love/pseuds/Satellite_Of_Love
Summary: ''And in the darkened underpass I thought ‘Oh God, my chance has come at last’ But then a strange fear gripped me and I just couldn’t ask.''In a world where very few people get to meet their fated one, Minho wishes he had never met his. Slave to sui generis feelings, he has a need to break free that will be almost impossible to fulfill.
Relationships: Han Jisung | Han/Lee Minho | Lee Know
Comments: 22
Kudos: 35
Collections: MINSUNG BINGO: Round One





	There is a light that never goes out

**Author's Note:**

> This work is part of the [Minsung Bingo](https://twitter.com/minsungbingo) event. Please go check them out, as some works are not published on AO3 and are directly post on twitter. This one in particular was made to fill the following squares: AU: Soulmates; Exes; Fake/Pretended relationship.
> 
> The fic title and the whole story was based in The Smith's There is a light that never goes out song, I invite you to check it out!

Outside, the pitter-patter of the raindrops marked a steady rhythm, a one-two one-two that could be followed to measure the passing seconds. Inside, the turmoil of gut-feelings and heartbeat put together in a vomit-inducing mix didn’t manage to be as precise as the outer world was, impossible to follow, impossible to count. Wanting to confess himself and only finding a void in his core, Jisung was faced with the consequences of his intrinsic indifference.

Minho had both of his hands on the wheel, his fingers thin and his nails clean. The pattern of rings in his hands didn’t have a meaning, it wasn’t put in a specific order or fashion, the colors and the shapes weren’t combined, but they were still able to convey a message to Jisung. The only ring Jisung could’ve cared about was missing. As expected as it was, it didn’t make the realization any less devastating.

‘’You are not wearing it.’’ Jisung commented as he traced a line over Minho’s naked ring finger, earning a shy shudder from him, who moved his hand backwards until Jisung’s skin was out of reach. The touching had always felt too intense and this wasn’t an exception.

‘’No.’’ Minho answered, laughing lightly in a nervous way, drying the hand that Jisung had touched in the fake leather of his pants as he focused on the road ahead of him. ‘’Figured it would be weird if I was.’’ He shrugged, putting his right hand back on the wheel and pulling a face not intended to be hidden.

‘’I am wearing mine.’’ Jisung retorted, never one eager to follow the less-uncomfortable path, but rather always striving for what he felt needed to be say. Other people would feel awkward or embarrassed to admit to be wearing their soulmate ring when the other party involved wasn’t, but it wasn’t the case for Jisung, he would’ve felt more embarrassed had he not be wearing it, the implications of it almost scary. Not that Jisung was scared, ever.

Minho cleared his throat, uneasy in that particular way that only Jisung could cause on him.

‘’Yeah, I noticed.’’

‘’I don’t find it weird.’’ Jisung added, grabbing his own ring and moving it around his ring finger. The friction burned, the ring fitted perfectly and didn’t leave much space for movement. ‘’They could’ve noticed that you weren’t wearing it.’’ Maybe pushing Minho’s socially conscious side had a chance at granting him a different reaction.

‘’They didn’t, did they?’’ The other man answered, not looking as bothered as he usually was when it came to what was expected from him.

‘’Maybe they did notice but decided not to say anything.’’

‘’Perhaps it’s time for them to notice, it’s been a month.’’ Minho said bitterly, moving his head to make sure that he could turn to the left without another car crushing into them. Jisung wouldn’t have minded crushing to death right then and there. ‘’It won’t be nice, but maybe it’s time to come out and admit that we are no longer together, I’m tired of pretending.’’

The lights of the road passed over them, lighting up and obscuring their faces, yellow and then black, and then sometimes blue or green or red, and then the black and yellow pattern over and over once more. Sparking and dying again and again, changing in a rapid way that Minho would’ve hated had he focused enough on it, it would’ve made him dizzy hadn’t it been pushed in the back of his mind, or so Jisung thought.

Silence built upon them, and Jisung couldn’t help but think that the situation felt like those moments in his childhood when wishing for something wasn’t enough for said thing to happen, and how incredibly frustrating it had felt for a kid used to not feeling much. Instead of waiting, observing and staying as an outsider, Jisung needed to act if he wanted to avoid what he feared would become his reality.

‘’Can you stop for a second?’’ Jisung asked, his voice coming out choked at the desperation that was starting to fill the void in his guts. To be able to feel had always been an overwhelming experience for him, one that he wasn’t prepared to take care of most of the time. When it came it was always like a tidal wave, too much and too sudden, too new and too overpowering.

‘’You asked me to take you home.’’ Minho answered in a low voice, almost a whiny one. Far from being a fool, he knew full well what would happened if he stopped the car, if he conceded Jisung his wish, if he bended to his own desires.

‘’I don’t have a home anymore.’’

Minho bit his lower lip, trying hard not to shed any tears, the imputation behind Jisung’s voice loud and clear, thumping against his temples as his hands and feet moved automatically, pulling over and stopping the car in an empty parking lot.

The click of the seatbelt getting unlocked reverbed against the silence of the night, the only other sound being the raindrops and the noise of the cars rapidly getting closer and then going away to never be seen again. Jisung’s hands were burning against Minho’s face, his touch as intoxicating as always, making him surrender to his need to feel his soulmate’s skin.

Fate fucking sucked, and being bonded to Jisung was the one curse he wouldn’t be able to get rid of for the rest of his life, worse than an incurable disease and closer to brain damage or a drug addiction, far different from the romanticized version of soulmates that the media portrayed. Minho sometimes felt a dread similar to being close to dying when he was separated from Jisung for too long, his heart physically hurt every time Jisung failed to be there for him, who in their right mind would want that?

Apparently, eighty percent of the population wanted that, those eight out of ten people that, statistically, would never be able to meet their fated one, those that would fantasize about something close to imprisonment and call it love without ever getting to know the struggles of actually living it.

They had been lucky, hadn’t they? Everybody said so, every single person around them was so jealous, everyone wanted what they had. In a world so infinite where there is only one way to meet that special person made for you, Minho and Jisung had found each other. They had crossed paths and looked at each other in the eyes, the only possible way to know, for no other indicator existed. Through a look, damnation had come upon Minho, and now he was a slave to some kind of bigger order he hadn’t want to have anything to do with.

But none of this held any sort of importance when Jisung came closer and pressed his lips against him, for nothing could be rationalized when the love of his life was this close to him, when his fragrance invaded his senses, so dangerously close to breaking every single one of the structures Minho had been working to create in order to protect himself.

Jisung’s lips where thin and soft, and downright perfect against him. Perfect not in a figurative way, but in a literal one, those lips had been made to kiss Minho, and no one would ever feel nearly as good as Jisung felt. His mouth tasted like home, like accomplishment and fulfillment and everything Minho could ever possibly desire, all of it converging in just one other human being. It made him want to bury his nails against his soulmate’s skin and demand him to never leave, to stay by his side until the end of times.

Jisung started touching and Minho only wanted to give up. Against the warmness of his body, the pleasure of his hands, the allure of his mouth, the kiss started to become saltier as tear after tear started running down Minho’s face, dropping as fast as the raindrops were hitting against the car, pacing faster and faster as an alarm rang in Minho’s head, and he knew he needed to stop before the breaking point.

‘’Jisung. ’’ Minho sighed against his mouth. ‘’Stop.’’ He asked as he ran his hand over Jisung’s cheek, almost impossible for him to avoid the contact.

‘’Why?’’ Jisung asked, desperation bleeding in his voice as he kissed Minho’s neck one more time, his hands fisting Minho’s shirt as he tried hard to restrain himself. ‘’You want to be with me, Minho, why won’t you let me?’’

‘’We’ve been over this.’’ He explained with pity in his choked, wet voice. ‘’You don’t love me, Jisung.’’

‘’I’ve never felt something as intense as what I feel for you.’’ Jisung said, sincere as he always was. Sincerity could be considered a good trait in a partner, but it had been long since Minho had realized that Jisung’s sincerity wasn’t that, it was more of an impossibility to read or care for social cues, a total disregard for other people’s feelings that overpassed what could be considered acceptable.

‘’I’m sorry to be so rough, but that’s fucked up. If this is the most you’ve ever felt then…I don’t even know.’’

‘’But you do know. You know I’ve never felt too much.’’ Jisung complained, frustrated once again at how impossible it was for him to comprehend this world and its rules of what should and what shouldn’t be said. ‘’Hell, I don’t think I even knew what feelings were before meeting you.’’

As much as it hurt Minho to admit so, truth was that Jisung wasn’t normal. In the past, he had wanted to know what was it that was wrong with him, he had wanted to understand why it was that Jisung acted the way he acted, but the answers to that question had started to become unnerving at some point, making him wonder if he really wanted to know what was lying behind his soulmate's incapacity to care for other people.

‘’This damn bond forces you to be near me, believe me, I know you need it, but there is nothing close to love in what you feel, Jisung, and you have showed it a million times. I’ve tried, you know I’ve tried, but you can’t love me and it hurts too much for me to stand it. I’m dying and being close to you doesn’t help me at all.’’ Minho explained as his face transformed into a red, swollen mess of agony, his words too real every time he said them out loud. By now, he had said them way too many times.

There was a reason for the de-bonding market to be on the rise, for doctors to be perfecting their techniques, for people to demand solutions to this enslaving condition. There was a reason for religious groups to be so strongly opposed to it as well, soulmates function as the foundation for a whole doctrine on how to understand the world, on how to see it, how to divide it and categorize it. It served its purpose, so it needed to remain the way it was, people not wanting to be bonded with their fated one only showed that the base of their ideology wasn’t as solid as they would like it to be, and they couldn’t have it that way.

But that was Minho’s reality, he couldn’t bare being bonded to his soulmate. That’s why he started the engine and made his way into Jisung’s house, and not home, no matter how shattering, how painful and devastating.

Jisung had never said it. He didn’t know how it would feel in his mouth, he didn’t know how much it would weight in his tongue or how his muscles would need to flex in order to make the sound, for he had never, not even once in his life, said ‘I love you’ to someone. He was an honest person, and he had never loved anyone in his life, so why would he say something he didn’t mean? He only used lies to deceive people, and Minho wasn’t someone he wanted to trick.

Maybe that was the key, maybe those were the magic words that would allow Minho to understand how Jisung had never needed another person as much as he needed him, how being apart from him felt like having an arm missing, or worse, a whole chunk of his brain. In his reality, his feelings for Minho represented the total and final extent of what he would ever be able to feel. He would never feel so nervous, so happy or sad ever again, nothing and no one would ever spark anything real in him. Minho held the keys to the feelings universe, to a place that he would’ve never experienced if he hadn’t met him.

For Minho, love was something common, something he had already experienced even if it had never been as intense as what he felt for his soulmate. For Jisung, Minho _was_ love, a feeling he hadn’t met at all before him.

Like a colorblind person meeting for the first time the tones that the world has to offer, Jisung had been able to feel something only through Minho. What was love if not this? He needed to say it, he needed to express himself. His future pended on a thread, and it was now or never. I love you, Minho, would you please come back to me?

_And in the darkened underpass I thought ‘’Oh God, my chance has come at last’’ But then a strange fear gripped me and I just couldn’t ask._

So Jisung opened his mouth only for silence to remain and not one noise to come out of it. Besides him, Minho had kept silently crying, even as he drove. His tears were painted in yellow and then in black and then the same pattern once again. Go and stop, over and over. Surrender to then roll back. Ask and never answer. Yellow and then black. Begging and giving back and then pushing and running away, over and over in the same cycle that their lives had turned into.

‘’Tomorrow I’m going to call my parents and tell them that we broke up.’’ Minho said, nodding as they got closer to Jisung’s house. ‘’It’s going to be very difficult and everyone will be against me, but it is the right thing to do. You should consider starting the de-bonding treatment as well.’’

Without Minho, Jisung would never be able to feel love ever again. He couldn’t tell if he felt scared or relieved, but then again, he had never been good at guessing when it came to his own feelings.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope this didn't hurt too much! If you liked this story I woud love to hear your thoughts! And if you really, really liked it I would appreciate if you read my on going drama/crime/mystery story that I am writing [As I lay dying](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23288572/chapters/55774546)
> 
> Go follow me on twitter [here](https://twitter.com/satoflove?s=09)


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